Don't make bushfire policy on the run

We've seen calls for the Australian Defence Force to be reinvented as a multi-billion dollar fire fighting agency; calls for some form of national service to provide battalions of semi-permanent bushfire fighters and calls for volunteer firefighters to be effectively conscripted into a paid national service.

It's even been mooted the Federal government should delegate powers to a panel of experts under Section 51 of the Constitution and that a new super agency, with the power to tax energy companies and other businesses to fund its activities, be set up.

While all of these ideas are well meant, the truth is most are impractical, unimplementable and loaded with unintended consequences.

Any attempt to pivot the ADF towards firefighting, for example, would surely compromise its ability to defend the nation while failing to deliver anything as efficient or as widely distributed as the volunteer organisations that form the backbone of our response.

The numbers tell the story. The ADF's strength stands at around 82,000. About 14,000 are in the navy, an organisation with a limited capacity to fight fires inland.

There are, by contrast, almost 200,000 volunteer firefighters nationally. NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia alone provide 180,000 of these. The direct correlation between the number of volunteers in an area and the level of local fire risk is no coincidence.

We have evolved a world class, highly skilled and motivated, well staffed and effective firefighting capacity over many decades of hard won experience. It would be wrong to rush to fix something that is far from broken just because some elements of that force are being pressed close to, but not yet beyond, their limits.

The immediate challenge is to come up with a temporary solution to the issues arising from the need to keep this volunteer force in the field during a dramatically extended fire season.

The Prime Minister has taken a step in the right direction by bringing the APS into line with NSW and granting government workers who volunteer with rural fire services an additional four weeks leave on top of existing entitlements. He has also called for private enterprise to do the same.

While Anthony Albanese is right when he says volunteers should not be left out of pocket because of their community service, we are never going to see a "one size fits all" solution.

Volunteers are as diverse as the communities from which they are drawn. Some are students, some are Newstart recipients, some are old age pensioners, some are self-employed contractors, some are public servants and so on, and so on.

One solution could be an immediate contingency fund to assist volunteers adversely affected this time around pending a more comprehensive arrangement to be put in place before the next fire season.

Any suggestion volunteers be paid or the services be "professionalised" should be approached with caution. Attempts to change conditions for CFA volunteers backfired badly when the issue was politicised by the Victorian Labor government and Malcolm Turnbull during the 2016 election.

Let us learn from this experience by commissioning an immediate and far reaching review drawing on the best available advice in Australia and from around the world.

We can't afford to make policy on a national issue of this importance on the fly.